I have to admit it.  I took certain pleasure in receiving an email from a highly organized friend, who had lost her way in her inbox.

“My email has taken on a life of its own,” she reported, and said she couldn’t find a message, several days back, which included some dinner arrangements for that week.

“Aha!” I thought. “It WAS a good idea for me to delete those 70,000 messages!”

The inbox clearing project had been on my mind for a while.  It seemed like the messages multiplied over night.  And they had, thanks to my “system,” which involved glancing at the dozens of messages that seemed to arrive each day, reading a few, and leaving the rest alone.

By this, I mean not touching them. It took too long to delete them or – even longer – to unsubscribe.  The closer we got to the midterm elections and those daily fundraising requests, the fatter and more daunting the message load became.  Time passed and with it, the more difficult, as my friend discovered, to find the occasional useful message.

So the system-clearing proceeded on the theory that any message that he had lain fallow for more than six months would not be missed.  I deleted them from my inbox several thousand at a time, and then the same ones from my trash.  Ugh.   When I got the load down to about 300, I decided I was clean and defaulted to a daily routine of deleting dozens of uninvited messages –   for candidates, for shoes I had once bought, for competitors of shoes I once bought, and from people I had never heard of.

“Why don’t you just unsubscribe?” a wise friend asked.  And she had a point because the daily deletion ritual is itself time-consulting.  But unsubscribing takes longer in the first instance and is never certain.  First, there is the search for the grayed-out type at the bottom of the message, then the survey re. why I am unsubscribing and finally, the second chance to resubscribe and the offhand comment that it will take 4-6 business days at least to accomplish the un-subscription.  By then, will I even remember that I unsubscribed in the first place?  Should I maybe make a list?  But then what where would I keep it and what would I do with it?

So instead, I delete every day – sometimes days at a time when with a start I remember that I’ve fallen back into my old ways.  I cannot explain why the inbox is already up to about 500.  But still, with those dinner arrangements turning up so quickly,  I am abloom with self-righteousness and trying not to gloat.